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Why do you want to achieve your goal? Why do you even set goals?

In my last post about goals I mentioned many reasons why we end up giving up on our goals. In this post I am going to write about the underlying reason behind us giving up.

Reason most people end up giving up on their goals/dreams is because they do not have a strong enough reason, a strong enough why they want to achieve their goals. They get motivated by going to a motivational seminar, listening to a motivational speech, or reading a motivational book.

Sometimes we start working towards a goal with a strong purpose. But during the journey towards the goal we end up getting too caught up in the means. Sometimes we lose focus of our real purpose for achieving the goal.

For an example: you want a healthy and a muscular body so you start exercising.  You learn all the exercises and start performing them with perfect form.  You start eating right as well.  Everything’s going great until you start seeing other people lifting tons of weights at the gym.  Instead of focusing on your exercises and form you let your ego get the better of you.  You start trying to lift heavier and heavier weights while sacrificing your form.  You forget your real purpose and start focusing more on lifting heavier and heavier weights. But there’s always going to be someone stronger than you so you start to let that get you down.  You try harder and harder until you injure yourself and eventually you quit.

Another example: you start a blog for the sole reason of helping other people.  You learn about blogging, marketing your blogs and so on to start monitizing your blog.  Nothing wrong with that as if you’re providing service to the people you deserve to be rewarded for it.  But you start to focus more on money and less on providing service, or what you real purpose was to begin blogging.  After a little while and not much money coming in from your blog you get discouraged and eventually quit.  This happened because your focus shifted to making money.  You lost track of your real purpose.

If you have a strong enough reason for achieving any goal and you look at it on a consistent basis (e.g. once in the morning when you wake up and once before going to bed), you will be unstoppable!  Your purpose and goal will get so strongly imbedded in your subconscious mind that all the forces in the universe will come together to help you achieve it.

Have you ever started working towards some goal with great enthusiasm but quit after a few weeks? Why is that?

If you were that enthusiastic about a goal what happened with in a few weeks to de-motivate you? Have you learned so much about your goal and why it’s a completely wrong goal for you in such a short time?

I’ve found many reasons that one can quit working towards their goal:

1. Life gets in the way; you get too busy with day to day activities such as cleaning dishes, grocery, laundry, checking email 20 times a day, drinking coffee, watching tv, smoke breaks and so on
2. Someone says something negative about your goal; this one is one of the worst ones – that’s why you shouldn’t tell too many people about your goal, just show it to them once you’ve achieved it; tell only the people who’re going to support you
3. It seems too hard
4. It is too much of a stretch for your present state
5. It is too much of a stretch mentally
6. You have negative beliefs that hold you back
7. Fear of success
8. Fear of failure
9. Reality is kicking in; achieving this goal’s going to require far more effort than you had thought
10. You are focusing too much on the means to the goal and not the goal itself
11. You can not imagine how you will possibly achieve this goal; with your current experience you can not see any way of achieving this goal
12. You are moving on to different goals
13. You are moving on to higher goals than the present one
14. You have a habit of starting a goal and then moving on to another one without finishing/achieving the first one
15. You have a habit of not finishing what you start

As you can see there are a lot of reasons that help us quit before accomplishing what we had set out to accomplish. A lot of the ones above seem quite related to each other and that’s because they are. I just wanted to break them down because sometimes unless we see exactly what we’re feeling or thinking, it just doesn’t click with us.

The main point is that what we really wanted to achieve, we have given up on it!! Everything else is an excuse. There is one exception and that’s #13. Sometimes when you start working towards a goal you progress so fast that you completely get bigger than your goal.

An example: you have a goal of earning $500/mnth in passive income through blogging. You start working towards it and at first nothing is happening so you keep on working and working. During that time you realize that you actually enjoy the work you’re doing and like the fact that you’re reaching out to so many people. So, now your mind shifts from earning $500/mnth to helping so many people.  This is what I call giving up your goal for a higher purpose/goal.

Eventually all of your work starts to pay off and instead of $500/mnth you start making $1000/mnth because if you provide genuine value you are bound to be compensated.